About "Behind the Scenes" Work

A frog in a well thinks he’s the king of the world.

This is the best analogy I can think of that explains how “behind the scenes” activity works, and why it might be hard for those users posting in the Whole of Staff Feedback thread to understand some of the stuff I am doing that they can’t really see.

When it comes to Sythe.org, I would say that the ultimate goals of the staff are:
1. To enforce the rules and keep the forums clean
2. To ensure the staff team consists of active, trustworthy, and mature members
3. To ensure official middlemen applicants are screened carefully
4. To ensure the rules are appropriate for maximum user satisfaction and safety
5. To ensure the site itself is secure, speedy, aesthetically pleasing, and contains all the features needed for user satisfaction

Item #5 on that list is my main priority these days, but I still carry out duties #1-#4 as necessary.

Ordinary users won’t often see me posting outside the Spam Forum, and even non-Administrative staff won’t be able to see many of my contributions.
I’ll give two examples of things I’ve done behind the scenes that are not really “private” or “classified”, and safe to share:

1. Ban Lookup Script
vBulletin was not really designed with a forum like ours in mind. The default banlist page included in vBulletin displays all banned users on a single, non-searchable page. We have over 35000 users in total currently banned, so that wouldn’t work well! Though we added pagination before, the only problem that really solved was that we could now load the banlist without our browsers crashing: it still took ages to determine which page a user might be on, and staff may need a quick way to look up all bans set by a current or former staff member in some circumstances.

To that end, I added the following script to the Moderator Control Panel:




How does this help the site in the long run?
· Disputes can be processed quicker
· It is much easier to keep an eye on staff members if we feel they are getting too “ban happy”

Again, these tie into user satisfaction, and bring a net benefit to the site, even if ordinary users can’t see it.

2. Staff Activity Gauge:
Near the end of 2011, Matthew and I developed a new system called Mod Scores that replaced the older, inaccurate system of counting a flat number of number inline moderation actions each month. This system was used extensively until September 30, 2011 and had many problems including the fact that bans and infractions were not counted at all, it was very, very easy to cheat, and it discouraged staff from doing the actual important work (scam reports, ban requests, etc).

So, we added Mod Scores, which gives each staff member a “score” each month based on the following scoring criteria:
· Every Scam Report solved = 4 points
· Every Dispute solved = 2 points
· Every Ban issued = 2 points
· Every Spam Report solved = 1 point
· Every Infraction issued = 1 point (you can’t get more than 50 points per month for infractions)

For example, this is my Mod Score from Dec 2011:

This system is the reason the scam report section has almost never been more than a few pages long for the past 2 years (literally, before that very day, it used to be much, much worse; trust me).

Recently, admins have wanted to analyze the past six months of ModScores. Because the scripts currently in the Admin Control Panel only show data for the current and previous month, I had to write SQL queries to dig up the past 6 months of data(both individual for each month and a cumulative total so far).

The point of this thread is to remind everyone that I am working behind the scenes even if you don’t see me on site. I understand that you may not see me do actual admin-ing that is visible to ordinary users, but I hope this thread has made it clear that I am still doing work that ultimately benefits the entire site in the long run.

 

Thanks for the detailed post, I know many users, myself included are curious about the inner workings of an admins duties on a day to day basis.

 

You've been very busy behind the scenes. Good to see you've made Sythe's mod panel easier to use.

Keep up the good work!

 

Awesome! That banned user search script would have come in handy when I was using a Vb ACP.

Thanks for taking the time to make this thread and for your continued hard work on the site.

 

Thanks for sharing some of the stuff you do behind the scenes with us

 

Looks very nice and it will be great to speed disputes up! Also great work!

 

I'm sure the community as a whole will appreciate this detailed response. I can understand its har and confusing for some members of the community to understand the "behind the scenes" work you and other staff do. Keep up the good work, govind.

 

Yes I also run a v bulletin site the back end is very challenging and take a lot of work and time to keep up and maintenance. This forum has about 10x the members of my forum and I spend at least 2-3 hours out of my day trying to fix user errors and site errors so I know the feeling anyways keep up the good work.

 

Thanks for sharing the behind the scenes work you do with us. Keep up the great work

 

This is awesome and very handy. Thanks for sharing.

 

The ban look-up script is the best thing IMO..
We used to have to search for ages looking for threads etc as why a guy was banned. Now it can take seconds

 

It is build into the vbulletin software right or is it an ad on?

 

No, it's an add on that has to be scripted from scratch.

 

Perhaps, since regular users are unable to give accurate feedback to the admins that handle the behind the scenes work they should be removed from the feedback thread?

 

The way I see it is if you weren't doing behind the scenes work, I doubt you would still be in the admin position, not based off the fact that you'd be demoted, but based of the fact I believe you would resign if you thought there was nothing you could offer to the site.

Thanks for sharing though.

 

Nice, would be great if every admin posted about what they do

 

Thanks for the insight, an interesting read. It would be nice if you could keep us updated this way.

 

I appreciate all the work you do Govind to make my job easier, so thank you.

 

great read, never knew about the whole point system :/

 

looks really good govind